Situations and Interpretations: Explorations in Interpretive Practice

Interpretation has long been a central problem for linguistic and cultural analysis. Given that conceptual categories never completely "fit" the messy situations of everyday life, how do people make sense out of situations in ways that make sense to others? How do they articulate the meanings they derive from the streams of experience around them? Much of the literature that has focused on these issues has emphasized the ways in which interpretation is "overdetermined" by the political, economic and social contexts in which it takes place. Such analyses often run counter to the life experiences of the interpreters themselves. On the other hand, analytic approaches that reduce interpretation to pre-established rules, routines and frames often emphasize the notion of "shared" norms of interpretation. They hence fail to address the fact that acts of interpretation take place within situations that are experienced sometimes as routine, sometimes as unique and unrepeatable, but which are always bound by local histories and social relations.

One way to examine such problems is to look into the lives of those actors socially charged with responsibilities for interpretation: diviners whose proclamations articulate cultural meanings and reproduce social structures, journalists who must turn strips of experience into reportable and consumable events, healers who must convert visual signs and oral reports of subjective experiences into diagnoses and treatments, bureaucrats who must translate the life experiences of clients into legalistic categories.

This collection of articles is an initial effort to engage with "interpretive practice," the ways that routine procedures, cultural categories, and social positions come together in particular "instances" of interpretation. By paying special attention to the discourses through which interpreting actors articulate their own experiences, the authors of these articles explore ways anthropology can understand practices of interpretation as habitual but indeterminate, strategic and situational. They thus seek to present insights into the lives of those charged with the task of interpretation, to offer an "ethnography of interpreting" which reveals insights into not only the process of interpretation itself, but also into the cultural fault lines that are exposed by the interpretation process.

Interpretation as Practice

The role of interpretation as central to anthropology has its roots in Weber's notion of verstehen, and his insistence on the centrality of the hermeneutic tradition in the analysis of social interaction (Weber 1949, 1968). But it is also rooted in the pragmatic linguistics of Bronislaw Malinowski. Malinowski's efforts to discover the meanings of magical formulae led him to the realization that interpretation is a process that subsumes translation; indeed, he argued, mere translation is, in fact, impossible. In order to translate anything one must recreate the social and cultural context in which the item to be translated exists, and this requires considerable rhetorical work (Malinowski 1966). For anthropologists writing ethnographic accounts, it is often easier to use untranslated vernacular terms unapologetically, hoping that the reader will come to an understanding of what they mean once they have completed the monograph, and assimilated the broad context in which these materials live.

However, the focus on interpretation in the social sciences has tended to center on the role of scholars in interpreting people's actions ex post facto. The process of constructing causal narratives and structural models for explaining human action often sidesteps the issue of how these patterns are realized in everyday life. A central problem for anthropology involves exploring how people make sense of the world around them from messy situation to messy situation, managing ambiguity, repairing misunderstandings and negotiating meanings.

The articles in this collection address this problem by studying people who do kinds of interpretive work—ethno-interpretive work, if one likes. Brad Davidson's bilingual interpreters in a hospital setting work under pressure to filter relevant medical information between doctor and patient. Dan Lefkowitz and Mark Peterson deal with media interpreters trying to present reductions of real events for an audience. John McCreery deals with the world of persuasion in sales and advertising in Japan where the seller's message must be reified through complex cultural filters. Jim Wilce's Bangaladeshi diviner, Delwar must interpret people's own world to...